Obama Looks to Paris to Leave His Climate Change Legacy

In his State-of-the-Union address, president Obama again confirmed that “saving the climate” remains one of his top priorities. Yet an official December 2014 confab in Lima, Peru did not really conclude anything — certainly no binding Protocol to limit emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) — but it “kicked the can down the road” to the next international gabfest in Paris, scheduled for 2015.

It is not at all difficult to predict what will happen in Paris; in fact, it is a “no-brainer.” There will be an agreement of sorts, but it will be essentially meaningless. Yet it will be hailed as a “breakthrough” by the White House and thus form an important part of the “Obama Legacy.” Meanwhile, there has been no significant warming for the past 18 years.

Consider:

– The climate continues to plateau; no significant warming has occurred in nearly 20 years—in spite of a greater than 10 percent increase in CO2.
– Scientists, both alarmists and skeptics, are still trying to explain this “pause” — as it is sometimes called. The word Pause denotes an expectation that the climate will again warm — although no one has any acceptable hypothesis as to when the warming might resume, if ever.

The world is looking forward to the 21st annual COP (conference of the parties to the global climate treaty), which will be held in December of 2015. It is hoped by many that Paris will end up with a climate protocol that will continue and even surpass the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, which expired in 2012 and achieved practically nothing except to waste hundreds of billions that might have been better spent addressing genuine world problems—without accomplishing its main goal of reducing global emissions of the much-maligned greenhouse gas CO2.